Searching Foreign Language Sources

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[edit] LexisNexis Academic

[edit] Finding Group Sources

On the News search, there is an option in the dropdown box for "Toute la Presse - Français" which will give you all French-language news. There are similar options for Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. (Please don't ask me why the French and German combined sources are named in the vernacular while the others have English names!)

There is no sure-fire way to use the Sources tab to discover the big group files for each language. For narrow source types such as Law Reviews, use the Find tab and restrict by Language. To find the broad source files you can do a Find on the words French Sources (don't use any quotation marks). This will bring back

Toute la Presse - Français French Language European News Sources Combined Quotidiens régionaux - France

[edit] Easy Search

A great way for students to get stories from the major news sources is exploit the advanced search features supported in the Easy search form: -Choose Easy Search form -Select "Major World Publications (Non-English) and make sure all other selections are not checked -In the Search Terms box start with Language(French) and ...

This will do a search that combines relevancy ranking and the language restriction. It is not necessary to use rigorous Boolean query construction. For example, a query such as the following will work: 

    Language(French) and sarkozy G8

If you entered this same search in Power Search using the Terms and Connectors approach, you would only get hits where "Sarkozy" and "G8" were adjacent, but on the Easy form you get all documents with a good relevancy rank for both terms. The correct format in Power Search would be something like: 

    Language(French) and sarkozy w/p G8

[edit] Note on SmartIndexing

LexisNexis SmartIndexing is language-neutral. This means that you can use the English index terms appearing on Power Search or News (expand the "Add Index Terms" option) to search materials written in other languages.


[edit] Accents, Diacritics, and Morphology

The best rule for handling diacritical marks such as accents is to search as you hope to find. Since the full text of materials in languages other than English includes accents, umlauts, etc., it is always safe to inlcude the proper diacritical marks when you search that text.

It usually normally safe to simply omit diacritical marks. The following pairs of search terms are equivalent. 

président français
president francais

señor
senor

The most important exception is the umlaut (two dots appearing over a vowel), which should be replaced by adding an "e" following the vowel. 

Küste 
Kueste

When special morphology is used, you can substitute English characters using the standard transliteration rules. 

Straße
Strasse

The Chicago Manual of Style provides an excellent guide to transliteration rules.

[edit] Links to Foreign-Language Group Files

See also the LexisNexis Academic Delicious site for a full listing of foreign language news sources. The links shown below are Subscription Links that will only work for authorized users.

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